Tech limits: Iran ending dream of remote-controlled war

In Washington, planning for a war with Iran always started with the same stubborn reality: it would be hard to fight and even harder to win. The country is vast and mountainous. Much of its military infrastructure is buried in caves and bunkers. Any serious plan to neutralise Iran’s nuclear ambitions or topple the regime quickly arrived at the same conclusion — that success required ground forces and would result in American casualties.

Then came machine learning and artificial intelligence, and with them, the seductive idea that America might finally be able to fight a major adversary indefinitely without sending its citizens into the line of fire.

The promise is not mere fantasy. AI, fused with increasingly precise weapons and blanket surveillance, has transformed what the US military can do from a distance. The accuracy and speed with which American forces can now find and destroy enemies with potentially fewer US and civilian casualties are a major advance in the nuts and bolts of warfare. As Adm Brad Cooper, the commander of US Central Command, who is leading the war with Iran, said on March 11, AI tools can turn targeting processes that “used to take hours and sometimes even days into seconds.”

Yet for all the increased speed and accuracy of AI-assisted targeting, the war is showing that the physical world still imposes major barriers to victory. The scale and dispersion of Iranian drones are more than AI alone can overcome. Short-range missiles, especially on mobile launchers, can survive even in a world of constant blanket surveillance. If planners had dreams of a final victory for remote-controlled warfare, in Iran, they have awakened to a harder reality.

The changes technology has brought to warfare in a single generation are genuinely striking. On one occasion, several years before Sept 11, 2001, the US used satellite-phone data to target Osama bin Laden at a camp in eastern Afghanistan. By the time the Tomahawk missiles were fired, bin Laden had changed plans. Today, as missiles and drones take off toward Iran, real-time satellite and drone footage allows them to adjust course and speed based on live inputs.

AI is also delivering better battlefield intelligence from a distance than soldiers deployed in the field could have done just a few years ago. Right now, US drones are blanketing Iran, collecting video and intercepting signals, transmitting all of them to warships in the Persian Gulf. That data can be cross-referenced with people via their phone numbers, transcripts of communications and the places they recently visited.

In remote areas of Iran, where missiles and drones are hidden in underground bunkers, AI can study changes to the soil, thermal signatures, and vehicular patterns in search of possible launch sites. When Iranian fighters exit bunkers to fire missiles, surveillance drones can identify them as a threat, sending a signal to nearby ships or planes to fire before the munition is launched. These capabilities could have given decision-makers the impression of a low-risk war. However, as the US becomes entangled, that hope seems a mirage.

Iran is larger than France, Germany, Britain and Italy combined. Drones are hard to find even when you know where to look. Their launch does not emit a detectable explosion, and they are easy to conceal. Iran’s Shahed drones can even be launched from the back of a pickup truck. There are simply too many trucks spread across too large an area for automated surveillance to find and destroy every target before it takes flight.

Short-range ballistic missiles have also proved harder to counter. Most missiles fired this year have been short-range weapons aimed at Gulf countries. These are mobile and small, giving the US less time to respond.

For all the advantages of AI-enabled targeting, it has not eliminated civilian casualties. The Pentagon attributed the mistaken targeting of a school in southern Iran, where at least 175 people died, to outdated intelligence. This shows that AI has not solved the fundamental challenge of preventing civilian deaths in a dense, contested environment.

The limits of AI warfare will likely only become clearer if troops fight adversaries up close. One thing is already clear: AI’s impressive capabilities have made it easier to start a war, but they have not yet been enough to win one.

The New York Times